Leonardo Gallery

Simultaneous Echoes

Artists’ Article

Soma: Live Musical Performance in which Congruent Visual, Auditory and Proprioceptive Stimuli Fuse to Form a Combined Aesthetic Narrative

by Ilias Bergstrom and R. Beau Lotto

ABSTRACT: Artists and scientists have long had an interest in the relationship between music and visual art, leading up to the present-day art form of correlated animation and music called visual music. Current live performance tools and paradigms for visual music, however, are subject to several limitations. The work reported here addresses these through a transdisciplinary integration of findings from several research areas, detailing the resulting ideas and their implementation in three interconnected software applications. This culminates in the art form of Soma, in which correlated auditory, visual and proprioceptive stimuli form a combined narrative.

Artists’ Note

Intrinsic Art: A Cultural Capsule

by Sherban Epuré

ABSTRACT: In this article, the author introduces Intrinsic Art as the theoretical foundation of his work. He explains how Intrinsic Art is a synthesis of art’s fundamentals, mathematics, philosophy and technologies. Three strands of his work derived from it include Meta-Phorms, S-Bands and Protruded Sculptures.

General Articles

SCIENCESTORE: An Art Space Designed for Science

by Jorge Pérez-Gallego

ABSTRACT: Science and art are two ways of thinking about the world—both the inner and the outer. The author’s performative interactive installation, SCIENCESTORE, provided him an ideal scenario for deepening his understanding, by means of design, of the economics of science, science outreach and shifts between science and art.

Quicker than the Eye? Sleight of Hand and Cinemas of Scientific Discovery from Chronophotography to Cognitive Film Theory

by Colin Williamson

ABSTRACT: This article explores the topic of scientific discovery in two cases of intersections between imaging technologies and sleight-of-hand magic in the domain of nontheatrical film and media. The first case is the French psychologist Alfred Binet’s use of chronophotography to study magicians in the 1890s. The second is the reanimation of Binet’s study by cognitive (neuro)scientists beginning in the early 2000s using eye-tracking cameras and other digital-imaging devices. The author focuses on how both cases treat the magician as a medium of discovery and how both use optical devices to “see” visual processes related to the experience of wonder.

Technical Note

Application of Cellular Automata for a Generative Art System

by Jae Kyun Shin

ABSTRACT: In this article, the author describes a study that proposes the use of cellular automata (CA) as a useful tool for a creative pattern-generating art system. A one-rule firing CA is used to efficiently represent basic CA patterns. The key idea in this method is to mix basic patterns in order to design complex patterns. Two types of mixing—iterative and hierarchical—are introduced. The results are demonstrated through example patterns, including ornamental and tiling patterns. The concept of an expanded neighborhood is introduced and applied to the generation of flower-like images. The author concludes with several suggestions for future research topics in relation to the proposed method.

Statements

Mediations on a Digital Workforce

by xtine burrough

ABSTRACT: The work presented here ranges from small-scale interventions on Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk virtual crowdsourcing job board to collaborations with the Turkers (workers) for exhibition and festival play. Virtual job boards have a tendency to commodify digital labor, often resulting in exploitative practices. In these works, the author offers the Turkers a reprieve from the tensions between play and labor (play/bor) with an opportunity to express themselves while being paid for their creativity.

OPTICKS and Visual Moonbounce in Live Performance

by Daniela de Paulis

ABSTRACT: OPTICKS is an art project realized by interdisciplinary artist Daniela de Paulis, in collaboration with the CAMRAS radio amateur association based at the Dwingeloo radio telescope in The Netherlands. The project is presented as a live audio-visual performance during which digital images are transmitted as radio signals to the Moon from a radio station in Brazil, the U.K., Switzerland, Poland or Italy. The signals reflected by the Moon’s surface are received by the Dwingeloo radio telescope, converted back into the original images and projected live at an exhibition venue. The project uses Visual Moonbounce, an application of the Moonbounce technology, developed by the artist in collaboration with the CAMRAS team during her residency at the Dwingeloo radio telescope.

Interactive Musical Display of Quantum Dot Emission Spectra

by Eathan Janney and Guillermo Muñoz-Matutano

ABSTRACT: Quantum dots (QDs) are zero-dimensional semiconductor nano-structures composed of thousands of atoms. QDs are often referred to as artificial atoms because their small structure results in unique, atom-like behavior; like atoms, QDs have optical emission at discrete wavelengths. Here the authors describe a novel method to interactively learn about the spectral properties of QDs using musical intuitions. They transform spectral information from selected Indum Arsenide (InAs) QDs into musical information, including both pitch and rhythm. Thus, they generate a multisensory experience of spectral information allowing users to learn about the range of frequencies of QDs as well as their unique spectral properties resulting from
coulombic interactions.

Art/Science & Big Data: Parts 1, 2 and 3

by Gordon Knox

ABSTRACT: The essay materials abstracted in this article present a look at Big Data and a review of the role the arts play in the evolution of the human species and the collective, cumulative project of assembling scientific and artistic knowledge: Part 1: how art and science are similar; Part 2: how their approach to “knowing” differs and how together they create knowledge; and Part 3: how these systems of knowing apply to the transformations activated by the digital revolution of the past 25 years. In concert, art and science might enable a collective human response sufficiently resilient to survive the natural and cultural challenges ahead.

Mapping Paris: Social and Artistic Networks, 1855–1889

by Claire L. Kovacs

ABSTRACT: Mapping Paris: Social and Artistic Networks, 1855–1889 charts and analyzes 19th-century social networks in order to map the artistic collaborations taking place in Paris between the Universal Expositions of 1855 and 1889. In doing so, it allows scholars to view the data in novel ways and to foster considerations of aesthetic dialogue through crossed paths, acquaintances, friendships, conversations and collaborations in the social condenser of Paris. This article focuses on situating the project on its theoretical foundations, considers some of the research questions that can be investigated through such a methodological tool and contemplates the implications on the discipline of art history.

Idiographic Network Visualizations

by Giorgio Caviglia and Nicole Coleman

ABSTRACT: In this article the authors present an ongoing research project aimed at supporting scholars in the exploration of historical networks through a highly visual and interactive environment for the construction and the manipulation of graphs. They briefly illustrate and discuss a set of techniques defined within a multidisciplinary academic context to better integrate scholars and students’ knowledge beyond the graph.

Network Landscape of Western Classical Music

by Arram Bae, Doheum Park, Juyong Park and Yong-Yeol Ahn

ABSTRACT: Network science has shown itself to be useful in understanding a complex system by allowing us to unearth novel and intriguing patterns among its components. It is playing a particularly integral role in understanding social systems where collaboration between people is essential. Music is one such domain, as evidenced by how its centuries-old history is filled with intriguing episodes of collaborations between its central personalities and the influences they exerted on one other. In this article, the authors present their findings in the network understanding of the landscape of collaborations in western classical music.

Echoing Narcissus: Bio-Adaptive, Game-Based Networked Performance

by Heidi Boisvert

ABSTRACT: In this paper, the author provides a critical examination and a creative reversal of the legacy of cybernetics. It seeks to both interrogate the underlying rhetoric fueling the post-biological technocracy and explores how embodied, bio-adaptive, game-based networked performance practices can serve as an antidote.

The Pain of Complexity

by Dmitry Zinoviev

ABSTRACT: In the scholarly community, the concept of complexity is typically associated with science. However, the consumer view on complexity is different. To understand the conceptual structure of complexity, the author analyzed self-declared interests harvested from complexity-related blogs in LiveJournal. The author arranged the interests into a semantic network, based on their similarity of use. The network has a modular structure and consists of four clusters linked with four aspects of complexity: Science, Philosophy, Art and Soul. Apparently laypersons perceive complexity not only as a scientific phenomenon but also as an intricacy associated with creativity, search for wisdom, and a potentially painful soul search.

Special Section: Highlights from the IEEE VIS 2013 Arts Program (VISAP’13): Part 3

Introduction by Guest Editor Angus Forbes

Art and Science as Creative Catalysts

ABSTRACT: Science, Art and Science Art collaborations are generally presented and understood in terms of their products. The authors argue that the process of Science Art can be a significant—perhaps the principal—benefit of these collaborations even though the process may be largely invisible to anyone other than the collaborators. Hosting the Centenary of Canberra Science Art Commission at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) has shown the authors that while Science and Art pursue orthogonal dimensions of creativity and innovation, collaborators can combine these directions to access new areas of imagination and ideas.

ABSTRACT: This paper reviews some of the visualizations employed to represent information during the Middle Ages. It discusses three kinds of visualizations: rotae, tables and trees, and considers their context and use.